How to choose a masterclass at the 2018 Loeries Creative Week

Loeries Creative Week is the biggest gathering of creatives in Africa and the Middle East.

In August 2018,

The festival is often lined up with several activities, some of which include masterclasses. The masterclasses are hosted at the Durban International Conference Centre on Thursday, August 16, the day before the first awards night. There will be eight sessions -- four happening simultaneously in the morning and four in the afternoon. Morning sessions will last from 10 AM to 1 PM and afternoon sessions from 2 PM to 5 PM.

The morning sessions include ‘Put experience at the centre of your organisation’ hosted by Accenture, ‘What's your story: Steps to build a personal brand’ hosted by Goliath and Goliath, ‘The unskippable future of advertising’ hosted by Google, and ‘Female representation and the media - who controls the narrative?’ hosted by Women in Marketing.

The masterclasses cover different areas of interest, mostly media and business. You have to decide which area is most interesting to you and pick one topic to follow.

The session hosted by Accenture will touch on topics such as how to embed design at the core of your organisation, how to develop and nurture an organisational culture, and how to combine the power of design and data. It will be presented by Marcel Rossouw, the capability lead for Design and Innovation at Fjord South Africa, a part of Accenture.

Goliath and Goliath’s masterclass is self-explanatory; the focus is on helping you build a personal brand. The class will provide a couple of hacks, focus on what content to put out and how to remain consistent with it and will be presented by Donovan David Goliath, a comedian who left his lucrative advertising job to focus on his craft.

Google’s masterclass is majorly focused on how you can win your target audience’s hearts with adverts that creatively tell stories that sell your brand perfectly. Consumers have short attention spans and brands need to understand this and adapt to a new type of creative storytelling with ads that are built for attention. During the afternoon session, the focus shifts to exploring how we can learn more about consumers from one of the largest and most real-time data sources available - Search. Both of these sessions will be presented by Bill Corbyn, Creative Director & Head of Google’s Unskippable Labs.

Then there is the Women in Marketing (WiM) Africa’s masterclass which is majorly aimed at the impact the under representation of senior female executives at the very top of our organisations has on the portrayal of women in the media, and the effects on our society and culture. The class will be handled by two inspirational women Fahmeeda Cassim-Surtee, Chief Executive Officer, DStv Media Sales and Suhana Gordhan, the Creative Director of FCB Africa

Raizcorp come in during the afternoon session with their masterclass which focuses on entrepreneurial creatives as well as trying to tackle and settle the age-long confusing broadly held notion that entrepreneurs are either born or made. This masterclass will be presented by Allon Raiz, CEO of Raizcorp an incubator in Africa and which currently supports over 500 businesses.

The Shared Value Masterclass is where you’ll learn how the right strategy can reconnect profit and social progress and it comes up during the afternoon session. Shared Value acknowledges that, in order to be sustainable, a business must generate a profit – but this does not have to be at the expense of purpose. This class will be co-presented by Cindy Langeveld, the Director and Co-Founder of Shift Social Development and The Shared Value Africa Initiative, Sanda Ojiambo the Head of Corporate Responsibility, Safaricom (Kenya) as well as Tiekie Barnard the CEO and Founder of Shift Social Development and the Shared Value Africa Initiative (SVAI).